Published byStanford Medicine

Updated 8-4-14: The video is no longer posted on the Al Jazzera website, but the online story is still available.

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7-30-14: Is it possible to cut the costs of late-stage cancer care by 30 percent and provide a much better experience for patients?

That’s the question that recently brought an Al Jazzera America TV news crew out to the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, to interview patients enrolled in a new Stanford-designed pilot study on cancer care. You can watch their 9-minute video on this topic here.

The guiding principle behind this cancer-care program is this: Make sure that patients are fully informed about survival odds and treatment side effects well before they’re on the brink of death, when emotions overwhelm the decision-making skills of patients, their families and clinicians.

“Eighty percent of all cancer patients express a desire to die at home, yet only 10 percent do,” says Manali Patel, MD, the VA hospital oncologist running this study. “These end-of-life conversations, which typically take two hours in the beginning and require many follow-on conversations, are too hard, time-consuming and draining for a busy oncologist to do well.”

For these life-and-death discussions, patients are assigned personal care coaches who help them understand the big picture — treatment side effects, survival odds and pain-relief options. They also have access to a 24-hour symptom-management hotline and an option for in-home chemotherapy.

Architects of this new cancer care model, working with Arnold Milstein, MD, at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, estimate that this program will lead to fewer unwanted treatments and expensive emergency room visits, saving the overall heath-care system money, while at the same time improving patient quality of life.